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Thursday, October 23, 2014

Some of Our Favorite Lego Activities

Do you have someone at home who just can't get enough Legos? Me too! Here are some of our favorite Lego activites from around the web! (You know, other than just playing endlessly with them) Many of them have an educational spin on them, because that's just how we homeschool mom's roll... All of these ideas (and more) are Pinned over on our Lego Projects board on Pinterest, which is a great way to keep track of them all (and future ideas we find online!)

Our first Lego idea that we loved was Lego Ice Explorationfrom Dayna over at Lemon Lime Adventures. The basic idea is to freeze a mini fig in ice and then have your child figure out how to remove them. A few tweeks we added to our own excavation project. We didn't let the ice fully freeze. My daughter who wanted to try this is only 4 years old. I was sure she would have a hard time waiting, or chopping away at the ice, so we only let the ice half freeze- the added benefit being it only took about an hour in the freezer before it was ready! I also had my daughter use actual Lego tools to remove the mini-fig from the ice.

That's a mini plastic axe she's using =)

She also used some rock salt we had and learned about how salt can melt ice faster. This was a great sensory activity. She even enjoyed playing with the ice well after the Mini-Fig had escaped. Dayna also has a great idea for Lego Calm Down Jarsthat you should really go check out as well!

Our second activity was a Color your own Mini-Fig free printable from Mary at Homegrown Learners. We love coloring in this house, especially something open ended like this that gives the kids the opportunity to branch out and make it unique!

Which, of course for many boys leads to Mini-figs holding axes and flame-throwers ;)

Our next project was a Lego Marble Run from Octavia and Vickey.com This became a bigger project for us since we didn't have a large Lego board, so we had to puzzle one together from our various small boards.

We also had no marbles so ours was a small Styrofoam ball run, which doesn't have the same ring to it but was equally as fun! This is such a great idea and really forced my big boys to be creative and think through the next step before each new path could be completed.

It also was a great lesson in patience as several of our original ideas didn't work out so we had to disassemble and try again! The final idea we tried out was the Lego Catapultfrom Science Sparks.com This was another excellent idea for making the Legos more educational!

The first catapult was functional, but not strong enough to be pulled back without falling to pieces. So we had to talk about reinforcing and how we could make the whole thing stronger.

We enjoyed finding some new Lego ideas and I hope you did as well! We have some more Lego ideas in the works including my son's idea for making up some Lego comics! Be sure to like us on our Social Media to be the first to know when new posts are up! (Right hand top of the page has all our links)